‘I get to watch.’ Arthur folded his arms. His eyes bored into my face. ‘What? You’re happy enough to do it in front of your brother, but you won’t do it in front of me? Whatutterbullshit. I paid for tickets to this little spectacle, withmytools, andmyshed, andmycar. With the food I put on your plates and the roof I put over your heads. Get in the car, all of you, now.’
Kate started openly sobbing. Rhianna’s eyes were huge in the moonlit bush, looking at me for help.Everyonewas looking at me for help, always.
‘We’re not doing that,’ I said.
‘Yes, you are.’
‘No, we’re not.’
Arthur took a step forward. The cuffs on his belt rattled. His nose was inches from mine. I could taste the ash on my father’s breath invading and consuming the taste of Rhianna King’s cherry lip gloss on my tongue. ‘Your decision, boy. You get back in that car and finish the job with that girl, and let me watch. Otherwise, I’ll meet you back at the house, and I’ll put on a private show, just for you.’
I knew what that meant. So did Evan. It meant I was going to sit on the steps of the front verandah of our secluded property and watch my father beat the shit out of my little brother, as I had donemany, many times before over infractions such as this. I had to make the decision for us all now. Either atrocity was going to be my fault. My natural instinct was to try to minimise the number of victims, protect whoever in the equation was lucky enough not to have Powder family blood in their veins. Contain the poison. Protect the outsiders.
‘Girls,’ I said. ‘Run.’
They didn’t need to be told twice. They took off down the dirt road leading back towards the highway. Rhianna was barefoot. Her handbag was still in the car. I opened the driver’s-side door to the Chevrolet while Evan hopped obediently into the front passenger seat, his eyes distant, breath fast. Arthur got in the squad car and flicked the high beams on, and rode our bumper all the way back down the mountain towards home.
In the rumbling darkness of the car, Evan was unnaturally still, his eyes on the rear-view. Dad must have been inches from the back of our car.
‘He’s right,’ Evan said. ‘We could have taken off.’
‘He’d have found us.’
We fell silent. After a while I said, ‘Sorry.’
‘Nothing you could do.’
He was right. There’d been nothing I could do. All Dad’s choices were false choices. Still, that didn’t stop me wondering. For years afterwards I would pick over my decision to send the girls running off into the bush, barefoot and terrified and vulnerable to whatever dangers waited for them out there in the night. The intention had been crystal clear in my mind: get them away from Dad at all costs. Whatever that meant for Evan and me. Whatever that meant for them.
EVAN
Istood in the corner of the room, texting Delle, feeling the waves of annoyance roll over me slowly at the past hour and a half spent in my brother’s company. The two forensic techs looked tired. They gloved up, gowned up, took to Chloe’s body slowly; unzipping the bag and standing, discussing a plan of action for a while in voices full of quiet reverence. I watched as discretely as I could, having witnessed this almost ceremonial procedure only a handful of times in my life. As one of the techs was turning Chloe’s head to release part of her ponytail where it was wedged, she murmured, ‘Here we go, lovely,’ like she was talking to a living being.
The two women started filling ziplock baggies of slides and scrapings and cuttings and combings taken from Chloe, beginning at the top of her body and working down.
All good?I texted my wife.
Just dropped off the second lot, she answered.They’re getting their safety briefing. First lot have gone through and are waiting.
It hadn’t even occurred to me that, because of the number of kids, Delle would have to make two car trips out to the paintball field with the teens, returning two sweaty, reeking, overstimulated carloads of them back again at the end of the day. I sent,You’re a saint.
Both sets of kids spent the whole trip out there deconstructing Monty Python films, she replied.BOTH sets of kids, Evan.
I felt a little sparkle of annoyance at Chris. It was an angry sort of envy at his freedom to be such a weird young man, at his ability to find delight at the idea that he might be genetically seven per cent Norwegian or to see the comic value in Monty Python without (much) judgement or ridicule from his parents. Sure, I rolled my eyes. Delle and I had issued plenty of bewildered and long-suffering sighs over the years, never more so than during Chrissy’s amateur taxidermy phase, which was immediately followed by hisRocky Horror Picture Showphase. I was envious of all the versions of himself Chris had got to be in his sixteen years. Anime Chris. Medieval-reenactment Chris. Animal-scat-collector Chris. Delle and I had never shamed him, even when things got really odd; we sent him to a therapist when he started collecting his fingernail and toenail clippings when he was nine, but never let on to the anyone outside the household about it. The only version of ourselves that had ever been available to Russell and me was carbon copies of our father, and he would loudly expose us to his cop friends when we stepped outside those bounds: lambasting me in front of an office full of cops once for knowing the words to a Britney Spears song, slapping a novel out of Russell’s hands in a supermarket in front of a group of women. The need to be like him had made us both cops and family men. But I wondered who I might have been had I not spent my whole life trying so hard to be Dad, or hating Russell because he was better at it than me.
By the time the forensics team finished up, they had two labelled paper bags full of specimens in tiny containers, and had bagged and tagged Chloe’s clothes, watch and handbag and added them to the collection. In all, they told me, there were a hundred and fifty or more evidence items to hand over at the Pemulwuy Forensic Evidence and Technical Services Command.
‘I’ll drive in convoy with you.’ I took my keys from my pocket, tossed and caught them. ‘I’ve got to see the samples in and wait for results.’
‘Oh, well, we’ve actually got to stop at Chatswood on the way back.’ The officer was in her forties, with a neck tattoo peeking up above her collar. She gave an apologetic sigh. ‘There’s a tripodcamera in the van we’ve got to lend to a team there who’re covering a gang rape.’
‘Why don’t they have their own camera?’
‘Government-funded police force, sir.’
‘Can’t you send it with someone else?’
‘It’s a big piece of kit. Needs the van.’
